This week we begin a two-part episode recounting my history as a movie buff. In this episode, we cover the drive-in movie era as well as early widescreen film formats such as Cinerama. Note there are lots of movie clips in the YouTube version of this week’s podcast so you might want to watch it on YouTube.

Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 52 of Contemplating Life.

I recently saw an interview with MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow talking about her new book titled “Prequel”. It’s about Nazi influence in the US government during World War II. Her colleague Chris Hayes asked her how she got into the topic. She said she had planned to do a book about present-day anti-Semitism but after researching its roots she ended up back in the late 1930s and 1940s. She said she suffers from a condition where every story she tells she wants to begin with, “An asteroid hit the earth and then the dinosaurs died, and then…”

I suffer from the same condition. When I tell a story, I always want to start at the beginning. For me, context is everything. You’ve already seen that in previous episodes. For example, I couldn’t tell my history of attending IUPUI without telling the history of IUPUI itself.

In last week’s episode, I talked about my ongoing struggles to be able to get out into a theater to see movies. It took everything I had to not start the story with, “The first movie I ever saw was…”

However, I can no longer resist the urge to scratch that itch. So rather than continue speculating about when I will see my last picture show, this week let’s go to the beginning and talk about the first picture show. This episode is about my history with the movies as far back as I can remember. My history as a movie buff is going to take more than one episode to cover in the kind of excruciating detail that I like to tell stories. So this is the first of a two-part story.

I will put my disclaimer up front this time. Last week I misremembered the order in which I’d seen some films over 40 years ago. Now we are going to go back 60+ years so I make no guarantees about the accuracy of this narrative.

I don’t know what was the first movie I ever saw, but I’m confident it was at the Lafayette Road Drive-in Theater. The drive-in sat in a 19-acre triangular lot bounded by 38th St., Lafayette Road, and Georgetown Road. It opened in August 1953 before I was born in July ‘55. It closed in 1982 when it was demolished and a strip mall was constructed there.

My earliest memories of the venue date back to when I was perhaps 3 or 4 years old. In those days, W. 38th St. was just two lanes. There were no streetlights, fast food places, or shopping centers. Lafayette Square Mall just north and east of Lafayette Road wasn’t constructed until 1968. I also seem to recall that the 38th St. bridge over White River was not yet constructed in my early days of visiting the drive-in so 38th St. was not yet the major east-west thoroughfare that it is today.

The nearest homes were perhaps two blocks away with the rear of the homes facing the drive-in. There may have been a small wooded area blocking their view of the screen. But as the area became more developed and the trees were turned down, residents complained when the theater started showing R-rated movies. They said that their children could look out their bedroom windows and see naked women on the screen.

I remember there was a small playground in the front near the screen with swings and slides for the kids to play on before the feature started. One of the swings had a baby seat that had a backrest, armrests, a bar across the front, and a strap that would go between your legs to keep you from sliding out. On at least one occasion my mom was able to get me into the seat. It was the first and only time I was ever to play on a swing set. I also have a memory of going back a second time and insisting that I get to play on the swing but I had outgrown the seat and we could not get my legs underneath the crossbar in the front.

In my quest to recall the first movie I ever saw, I’ve racked my brain and I’ve done lots of research on IMDb. My most likely candidate is “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad” featuring stop-motion animation by legendary animator Ray Harryhausen. According to IMDb, Sinbad was released in December 1958. That would’ve made me three and a half years old.

My family moved into the Eagledale neighborhood just seven blocks south of the drive-in in May 1959. I always presumed we didn’t go to that drive-in before moving into the neighborhood. Then again, even at our previous home on West 34th St. near White River and the canal, the Lafayette Road Drive-In would have been the closest to our home.

I have very few memories of living in that old house on 34th St. but I suppose a cool movie like that would have made a sufficient impression on me that I remember it at that young age. I wondered if perhaps I was thinking of a different Ray Harryhausen classic such as “Jason and the Argonauts” which was released in 1963. We probably saw both of these films but I’m fairly certain we did see Sinbad because it featured a battle with the legendary monster Cyclops and I definitely remember seeing that film at the drive-in.

I’m not ready to claim that this was the absolute first film I ever saw because I also have a vague memory that perhaps we saw a trailer for that film and my dad said, “Wow, we definitely needed to come back to see that one.” Then again, I could be remembering a trailer for “Jason and the Argonauts.”

While we are talking about Harryhausen films I am absolutely positive we saw “The Valley of Gwangi” in the summer of 1969. That film featured a bunch of cowboys who discovered a lost valley filled with dinosaurs. They capture one, bring it back to civilization, and put it in a circus where it kills a circus elephant and several innocent people. We had my five-year-old sister Carol with us. She wasn’t scared of the dinosaur. Quite the contrary, when they killed the dinosaur in the end, she cried. We tried to explain to her he was a very bad dinosaur who killed lots of people. She didn’t care. They didn’t need to kill it. I recently asked her if she remembered the incident. She said she didn’t have any direct memory of the movie but she has heard us tell that story for many years so that’s how she knows the story.

I’m about 90% sure we also saw the 1959 Charlton Heston version of Ben-Hur at the drive-in. It seems strange however that that film was released in November and Sinbad was released in December. I find it a bit improbable that we would go to the drive-in in the middle of winter. I have a vague memory that we did go to the drive-in in cold weather and that they would provide you with a small electric space heater that you could plug into your cigarette lighter rather than run your motor with the heat on. Unsure of that memory, I posted a message on a Facebook group called “Grew up in Eagledale” to see if anyone else had more certain memories of the Lafayette Road Drive-in. One person confirmed that she remembered that they would provide you with a heater and another confirmed that the drive-in was open year-round. Furthermore, just because IMDb reports when the movie was released, it’s quite likely that it went to indoor theaters first and drive-ins might not have shown it until summer. So I really don’t know when I saw these films.

In 1960, my dad bought a 1959 Plymouth. He was able to make the down payment on the car because we won $1000 in a Knights of Columbus raffle that we used to put in $1 each week. It was one of those cars which were typical of the time period with huge fins on the rear fenders. It had a large sloping rear window. See the YouTube version of this podcast for a photo of a similar car.

When we would go to the drive-in it was typically a double feature. I would be allowed to watch the first movie but they would put me in the back of the car on a shelf above the rear seat underneath that large window. I was supposed to try to sleep during the second movie and many times I did. But mostly I would lie on that shelf underneath the glass dome and stare at the stars and wonder how they worked.

I have distinct memories of asking my dad, “If the stars are suns just like our sun only really far away, and if the sun and the stars are in outer space, how can they burn when there is no air up there?” He didn’t have an answer but I vowed to figure it out one day. It was the start of my fascination with science, especially astronomy, and I trace it all back to staring out the window of the 59 Plymouth at the Lafayette Road Drive-in.

I can’t remember all of the films I saw at the Lafayette Road Drive-in but there are three that I remember quite distinctly because I bootleged them. Of course, this was long before you could buy your own video camera. So, I couldn’t bootleg the film itself but I could bootleg the soundtrack. For my eighth birthday in July 1963, I got a small reel-to-reel tape recorder with 3-inch reels. This was before the widespread use of cassette recorders.

In June 1964, I took my tape recorder to the drive-in with me to see “Mary Poppins”. By this time, we had traded in the old Plymouth for a Chevy Corvair Greenbrier Van which allowed me to sit in my wheelchair. I had a lap tray that sat across the armrests of my wheelchair and I set the tape recorder on my tray. I put the microphone up near the drive-in movie speaker. The quality of the tape recorder, the cheap microphone, and the horrible sound quality of the drive-in movie speaker produced a really bad recording but I didn’t care. I had a free recording of every song in Mary Poppins. A friend of mine had the soundtrack album but I claimed that my recording was superior because it included sound effects that were not in his album. For example when Mary is singing “A Spoon Full of Sugar” she is magically putting away the children’s clothes and toys. In my recording, you could hear the dresser drawers opening and closing

A month later, I also recorded everything from the Beatles film “A Hard Days Night” as well as a year later when I recorded the soundtrack from the Beatles film “Help!”. These three tapes were my prize possessions at the time. I have no idea what ever happened to them. Sometime in the early 70s, I got my first cassette recorder with a built-in AM/FM radio. I would use it to bootleg the latest hit songs off of WNAP-FM. [Echo FX] “The Wrath of the Buzzard!”

Although it was just mono and not stereo, the quality of recording off of FM was pretty good. I don’t recall bootlegging the soundtrack of any other films except those three but then again there weren’t many musicals that interested me in those days.

I talked to my sister Carol about her earliest memories of the movies and she recalled seeing “The Sound of Music” at an indoor theater but I think she went with my grandmother as I never saw that film until it made it to TV and I’m not certain I’ve ever seen it all the way through.

The first movie I ever saw at an indoor theater was in early 1964. The Marion County Muscular Dystrophy Foundation hosted an event where all the families were invited to the Indiana Theater at 140 W. Washington St. downtown. We saw the film “How the West Was Won” in Cinerama format.

Cinerama was sort of the 1950s and 60s version of IMAX. It was shot using three separate 35mm cameras that slightly overlapped. The outer two cameras were crisscrossed such that the right-hand camera pointed left and the left-hand camera pointed right. It was also projected the same way using 3 standard 35mm projectors which projected onto a large curved screen with a 146° viewing angle. It also featured seven-channel surround sound with five speakers spread behind the screen and 2 speakers in the rear corners of the theater. The sound was recorded on magnetic tape rather than optically recorded as were most soundtracks of the day.

Although there were some areas at the far edges of the theater where there were no seats and you could sit in your wheelchair, it wasn’t a very good viewing angle especially considering the curvature of the screen. Rather than sit with the other kids in wheelchairs on the side of the theater, my dad lifted me out of my wheelchair and I sat in a regular theater seat between Mom and Dad in the middle of the theater for a good view.

Watching a film on such a huge screen indoors with high-quality surround sound was an amazing experience compared to what I was accustomed to at the drive-in. There was a dark red curtain in front of the screen when you entered the theater. When the lights went down, the curtain would open to reveal the gigantic curved Cinerama screen. The film began with an overture of music. IMDb reports the runtime was two hours 44 minutes which was huge in those days. So much so, that there was an intermission and more music to introduce the second half.

I remember intermission music included the Civil War-era song “When Johnny Comes Marching Home”. I was so enveloped by the surround sound I started singing along in that embarrassing way that one sings out loud with headphones on and you don’t realize people can hear you. My dad had to tell me to shut up and just listen to the music.

Especially memorable were the scenes of a raft going down the rapids of a river partially breaking apart as well as a buffalo stampede that goes right over the cameras. I think that initial experience with Cinerama planted a seed that makes me such a huge fan of IMAX today.

Like IMAX, the first films shot in Cinerama format were documentaries and 5 such films were made from 1952 through 1958. Only two regular feature films were ever shot in the three-strip Cinerama format: “The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm” and “How The West Was Won” both released in 1962.

Filmmakers discovered was difficult to compose a scene using the three-camera process because any objects close to the cameras would be distorted if they went across the seams where the cameras overlapped their field of view. Although they took steps to try to hide the overlap, it was still visible in films. Documentary three-strip Cinerama films were shot and projected at 26 frames per second but the feature films were shot at the standard 24 frames per second.

Cinerama had a camera aspect ratio of 2.59:1. That means that the width of the image was 2.59 times its height. However, when projected, they often slightly cropped the top and bottom of the image to hide some distortion anomalies giving a projected aspect ratio of 2.65:1. For comparison, HDTD today uses a 16 x 9 aspect ratio which comes out to 1.77:1.

The three-camera Cinerama format was later replaced with systems called Ultra Panavision 70 and Super Panavision 70 both of which were shot on 65mm film to produce 70mm prints. Some of these films were marketed as Cinerama even though they didn’t use the original three-camera process because they still used the curved Cinerama screen. The river raft scene in “How The West Was Won” was shot in the single-camera Ultra Panavision 70 and then transferred to three-strip Cinerama.

Ultra Panavision 70 has an aspect ratio of 2.76:1 which was wider than three-strip Cinerama. It used anamorphic lenses to compress the aspect ratio during filming and then uncompress it during projection. Among notable films shot in Ultra Panavision 70 but marketed as “shown in Cinerama” were: “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, World” (1963) (which I saw at the drive-in), ”The Greatest Story Ever Told” (1965), and “Battle of the Bulge” (1965).

Probably the most famous and most effective use of the wide, wide screen of Ultra Panavision 70 was“Ben-Hur” (1959) with its iconic chariot race. It was never marketed as Cinerama. As previously mentioned, I saw it at the drive-in presumably from a 35mm print. The most recent Ultra Panavision 70 film was Quentin Tarantino’s 2015 film “The Hateful Eight”. He used 65mm film and cameras to produce 70mm prints. He paid extra to help theaters show the film in Ultra Panavision 70mm format wherever possible.

Several recent films have been shot using Ultra Panavision 70 lenses on digital cameras such as “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” (2016), “Avengers: Infinity War” (2018), and “Avengers: Endgame” (2019) all of which I saw in modern digital theaters.

Another similar format is Super Panavision 70. It uses spherical lenses to create an aspect ratio of 2.20:1. Down 20 as that Among notable films shot in Super Panavision 70 and marketed as Cinerama were “Grand Prix” (1966) (which I saw in the drive-in), “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968), and “Ice Station Zebra” (1968). Many other notable films were shot in this format but were not marketed as Cinerama because they were projected onto flat screens.

When Ultra or Super Panavision films were shown in Cinerama theaters using a single projector, they had to use special optics on the projectors to get them to conform to the highly curved Cinerama screens.

I saw “Ice Station Zebra” with my parents at the Indiana Theater in Cinerama again as a guest of the Muscular Dystrophy Foundation. I begged my parents to take me to see “2001: A Space Odyssey” in Cinerama but from some things they had heard about it, I think they thought it was perhaps too adult for me. I didn’t see 2001 until it was shown on TV many years later. Then it was rereleased to theaters and I was able to see it in a small 2-screen theater in the Speedway shopping center. It was described as Super Panavision 70 format but my guess is it was probably a 35mm print. I was always disappointed I never got to see it on a huge screen but at least seeing that one version in the theater was better than the TV versions I had seen which used pan and scan to fit the widescreen image onto a 4:3 standard definition TV screen.

Years later when seeing these films on TV, I never could understand why you could see the vertical seams dividing the Cinerama image into three parts on “How The West Was Won” yet you cannot see the seams on “Ice Station Zebra” and “2001: A Space Odyssey”. It wasn’t until I began researching this episode that I learned that only 2 Cinerama feature films were actually shot in the three-strip format and the others were shot with a single camera and projected with a single projector onto the curved Cinerama screens. That finally explains a lifelong mystery of why there never were any seams in these other so-called Cinerama movies.

See the links in the description to Wikipedia articles on all of these formats and other similar formats of the era such as Todd-AO. These articles include more extensive lists of famous films which were shot and shown in these widescreen formats.

Before we leave the drive-in movie era completely, we have to talk about the 1969 film “Winning” starring Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, and Robert Wagner. Newman and Wagner played racecar drivers who were rivals. Much of the film was shot on location at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway just a couple of miles south of the Lafayette Road Drive-in. My entire family has been lifelong fans of the Indy 500 so this was a must-see film. It included actual race footage of crashes from the 1966 Indy 500 and other races.

If that wasn’t enough to make the film important in my moviegoing history, it’s also the first film I ever saw that had a sex scene. Well… Sort of a sex scene. The film was rated “M” for mature audiences. Today probably it would rate PG-13 at worst and perhaps only PG. Newman and Woodward who were married in real life played a married couple. In the film, she has an affair with Wagner. There is a scene shot in the Speedway Motel where Newman walks in on Wagner in bed with Woodward.

Wagner was on top of Woodward in bed but they were under the covers and there was no nudity involved. Even though I was 14 years old I was still quite uneducated about such things and it prompted me to ask, “What were they doing?” I don’t quite recall what sort of evasive answer my parents gave me.

The last movie I ever saw at a drive-in was not at Lafayette Road but was at the Tibbs Drive-in which is the only drive-in movie still in operation in Indianapolis. I went with some of the guys in the neighborhood. It was the 1970 Roger Corman gangster film “Bloody Mama”. Corman is known as the King of B movies. The film starred Shelley Winters as real-life gangster Ma Barker and a then-unknown 27-year-old actor you might ever heard of. His name was… Robert De Niro. Do we know him? Yeah.

Not only was it a bloody gory gangster movie, but Ma Barker routinely had sex with her adult sons and their friends. The sons would argue over whose turn it was the spend the night with Mama. None of them wanted to do it.

I’ll never forget one line from the movie. When one of the Barker boys played by De Niro overdosed and died, mama was hysterical she shouted out to her son Herman who was out alligator hunting with a Tommy gun. “Your brother’s dead. It was that dope he put in his arm.” Herman Barker played by Don Stroud calmly replies, “Just bury him deep. There’s a lot of animals around here.” Typical Roger Corman B-movie fair. Some people consider it a cult classic.

This episode is getting quite long so I think this is a good place to split it. In the next week’s episode, I will recount more of my history of enjoying movies. We will focus on the evolution of special effects which have always fascinated me. Most of the times that I have purchased DVDs of films it was not typically because I planned to watch them over and over again but so I could see the “making of” features that explained how the special effects were created and this into the director’s commentary.

If you find this podcast educational, entertaining, enlightening, or even inspiring, consider sponsoring me on Patreon for just $5 per month. You will get early access to the podcast and other exclusive content. Although I have some financial struggles, I’m not really in this for money. Still, every little bit helps.

Many thanks to my financial supporters. Your support pays for the writing seminar I attend and other things. But most of all it shows how much you care and appreciate what I’m doing. Your support means more to me than words can express.

Even if you cannot provide financial support, please, please, please post the links and share this podcast on social media so that I can grow my audience. I just want more people to be able to hear my stories.

All of my back episodes are available and I encourage you to check them out if you’re new to this podcast. If you have any comments, questions, or other feedback please feel free to comment on any of the platforms where you find this podcast. Tell me your stories about the first movies you ever saw or take a nostalgic look back at your driving experiences.

I will see you next week as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe.